Professor Martin Paul Eve of Birkbeck College, University of London writes today in the Times Higher Education Supplement about suffering a stroke in his twenties. You can read ‘Coping with Illness’ here.
I’ve been working with medics and healthcare professionals as part of my 2016 creative residency in Queensland, Australia. I use Martin’s story as part of my workshops. It reminds practitioners that healthcare is about people as well as processes, and highlights how culture and access to information shape our experience of health and wellbeing.
When health organisations seek to deliver targeted community interventions, develop inclusive health systems, or improve their relationships with the populations they serve, there are overlaps with my field of creative work and community engagement.
I’ll be visiting the University of Southern Queensland next month to speak at their USQ Salon series.
If scholarship is a creative and critical conversation about the world, who are “we” having those conversations with?
What opportunities do institutions create for members of the public to have a go at what they do? And to fall in love with what they do?
From fringe scholarship to Fun Palaces, comic books and stone age megaliths to postcolonial controversy, we’ll be looking at what it means to share opportunities for learning, exploration, and adventure with the widest possible range of communities.
My belated Sunday morning read is this piece from the Guardian on London’s Secret Cinema, which blends movie screenings with theatrical experiences and themed activities:
I’m a big fan of participatory live-action storytelling and I’m fascinated by opportunities to blur the line between fiction and “real” experience, creating events where attendees shape the outcome of a story.
I went to a Secret Cinema event a few years back and was pretty disappointed – the set design and costumes were fancy, but the opportunities to get involved in the storytelling were minimal. I’d gone to see Casablanca and while it was cool to sing La Marseillaise at a bunch of actors in Nazi uniform, the rest of the “immersive experience” consisted of overpriced snacks and a “casino” barely worthy of a student union’s James Bond night. The Guardian piece captures the extent to which Secret Cinema events are now more about taking your money than letting you step into the world of a story.
This week I spoke at the Future Libraries two-day event at the State Library of Queensland. It was an opportunity for public librarians from across Australia’s Sunshine State to discuss plans, dreams, and schemes for the coming year.
There’s always a tension at such sessions, though hopefully it’s a productive one. On one hand, people like to be engaged, inspired, and provoked by speakers who they might not otherwise get a chance to hear or question. On the other, Powerpoint preachers don’t always make a lasting change, they don’t necessarily listen to the experience and creativity already in the room, and all too often those voices broadcasting from the stage are drawn from the same pool.
So, at Future Libraries, with just seventy-five minutes in the “naptime slot” straight after lunch, I tried to give Queensland librarians the best of both worlds.
We made comics together, but I also shared stories of the Lambeth library siege and Birmingham’s library cuts alongside the threats faced in Australia. We celebrated how public librarians are at their best under pressure, from Christchurch to Ferguson, but then it was time to get the whole room talking.
So we tried a version of the Presenterless Workshop.
This is an activity I’ve piloted with various groups, including library staff development sessions in London and regional England. Participants are each given one sheet of instructions from a set of five. By following the instructions on their sheet, they form groups which discuss what libraries should and can do from a range of perspectives. Those groups then share their discussion as a presentation or exhibition, and even the ways in which they interpret the instructions can be provocative and productive.
Rebel Rebel
As libraries evolve to meet today’s needs, and transform their own institutional processes and bureaucracy, we so often hear the mantra “Don’t ask permission, beg forgiveness”. Even I’ve said it in presentations, but I now I see that the spirit of the phrase is not quite right.
Although it encourages people to be less hesitant about trying new things, and has a rebellious ring to it, it also forces innovators into the position of the naughty schoolboy, breaking the rules but still ultimately desirous of, and dependent on, the institution’s resources, support, and long-term approval.
Instead, this presenterless workshop encourages participants to consider that organizational rules are more like guidelines to be interpreted than rules to be either obeyed or broken. A lot of the work I do is finding ways to marry up bright ideas and inspiring fun – like zombie sieges or time travel workshops – with the policies, plans, and success measures of big bureaucratic organizations. There’s almost always some wiggle room somewhere for you to justify creative activities, it just takes a little negotiation.
If you want to listen to a library superstar who is not your typical rebel-posing white bloke, I recommend Wellington Libraries’ Adrienne Hannan, a reservist combat medic and children’s librarian who compares library policies to military rules of engagement – not laws to be transgressed, but a framework within which soldiers must make serious practical decisions, under pressure, in a timely way.
Presenterless Workshop Resources
If you fancy running a presenterless staff development workshop in your library, I’ve included the relevant worksheets as free, Creative Commons-licensed PDF files in this blog post. Download them, play with them, give them a go — and let me know how you get on.
I just finished a seven-day stint at the rotating Twitter account @wethehumanities, where scholars, researchers, and practitioners from across the arts and humanities get to share their work and thoughts with around four thousand people online.
Inspired by the work of M.C. Escher, the event saw teens exploring comics and biography through thirty boxes containing text and images from the life of a mysterious woman.
Over the course of a two-hour session, participants transformed the thirty boxes into individual artworks which together formed a biographical installation: a three-dimensional comic book which used perspective and storytelling to respond to the facts and feelings of a stranger’s life.
Tiger the goat makes a record high jump – State Library of Queensland Archives
As part of this new adventure, I’ll be launching a weekly e-mail newsletter called Curious, Mysterious, Marvellous, Electrical. In it, I’ll share some of the things I find on my journey through the past, present, and future of Australia’s Sunshine State.
Today I’m running an event for Dulwich Picture Gallery’s Off The Wall series of teen workshops. Dulwich is the oldest purpose-built public art gallery in the world and this year I’ve been working with them on outreach events which address 21st century challenges in making art with communities.
Escher is currently undergoing something of a reevaluation, as Darran Anderson captures in his review of the exhibition. The artist, once seen as a creator of mere visual tricks, more suited to student-dorm posters and video game designs than critical interrogation, might now be recognised as influential and intriguing in ways we’d previously overlooked. This process of recognising the artist and his works afresh has parallels to the work of detectives re-opening a cold case; returning to the accumulated files, seeking new evidence, and trying to see it all from a fresh perspective.
Solving crimes is never really about arriving at a final truth; it’s about making a story which more closely and convincingly tends to the evidence at hand. This process also applies to the business of art history, and the activities which ran at Dulwich today.
Critical examination of Escher’s biography plays a part in our reopened investigation. Divorced from context, sold as a poster, used as the background of an old video game, an Escher landscape can look impersonal, technical, heartless. Nowadays, however, we recognise the ways in which Escher’s mindscapes are grounded in personal experience and observation. His youthful travels in Italy seem to have informed works like Belvedere; Escher’s visit to the Alhambra in Spain shaped his later explorations of pattern and tessellation. Micky Piller, curator of the Escher Museum in the Hague, recently discovered that many architectural elements from the artist’s “impossible worlds” can be found in the stairwells of Escher’s old high school.
For young people creating art, Escher offers a range of possible paths to explore. His Italian and Arabic influences demonstrate the way that leaving home for travel and adventure can provoke and inspire deeper reflection. At the same time, the fact that Escher returned to, and spent most of his life in, the Dutch town of Baarn reminds us that wonder can be generated in even the most ordinary of settings. In an age when we are increasingly preoccupied with the need for technological skills and scientific thinking, Escher reminds us that mathematics, science, and technology are always grounded in feeling, in human possibility, in a sense of wonder. As Anderson puts it:
The view of mathematics and science as purely and coldly intellectual exercises is exposed as inaccurate in Escher’s work; they are at work everywhere in nature; indeed, they are how we interpret the cosmos.
Countless books, movies, and shows from Harry Potter to Labyrinth and Doctor Who (which named an episode after Escher’s Castrovalva) have helped us to explore Escher’s cosmos by placing characters within their impossible architecture, lending life and motion to his precise, troubling geometries.
The figure of Escher, “modest yet colossal”, challenges our ongoing attempts to pigeonhole creative work. He is at once popular and ubiquitous to the point of banality, yet also marginal, his work set aside by the art-critical establishment. If his work has been dismissed on occasion as a “juvenile curiosity”, perhaps we should think on the current debate in which literary critics disparage YA literature, written for adolescents. Juvenilia has never been a weaker term of critical disparagement, in an era when young people are finally being accorded some of the power and voice to which they are entitled, and in which so many of us still feel the tensions and complications associated with adolescence. If Escher prints like Other World and Relativity are haunted by the traces of the artist’s high school experience, maybe he is the secret YA artist we never knew we had.
The contradictions abound. For the viewer, Escher made visual puzzles for which there was no solution; for artmakers, he found solutions to challenges in perspective which had no real-life equivalent. His work is “cold” and technical, yet steeped in personal experience and memory: the villages of Italy, the school of his youth, the tiles of the Alhambra where he imagined “a place of serenity where the universal laws of physics were everywhere and yet somehow might not apply.”
In Your Mind Is The Scene of the Crime, visitors explore this blend of the personal and perspectival when they are given visual and textual clues from the life of a mysterious woman. These photographs and snippets of prose will form the basis for a collaborative 3D visual artwork, creatively reconstructing a life story from limited cues.
In solving the mystery of a stranger’s life, and the challenge of juxtaposing images in three dimensional space, our Dulwich detectives will discover that solutions are only ever provisional; that the neatest account of the cosmos may defy the laws of nature; and that your mind is always the scene of the crime.
It’s been an eventful weekend, and I’m five days out from running a day-long experimental project here in the UK – more on that further down the line – but I wanted to share some of the excitement from yesterday’s International Games Day at the British Library (BL) in central London.
Gary Green of Surrey Libraries invited me to join the team of volunteers who were running events under the leadership of BL Digital Curator Stella Wisdom.
There were video games, board games, and some that were just a little off the wall, including the bizarre German box-stacking game Ordnungswissenschaft:
We were able to play this by repurposing the boxes from the infamous Comic Book Dice, which had also made a visit to the BL.
I got introduced to the German game by gaming aficionado Ross Fowkes. Ross also showed me a digital jousting game which used motion sensors and the music of Bach in multi-player battles.
“Johann Sebastian Joust” was inspired by a party game played with lemons and spoons. One quick trip to the supermarket later and we had unleashed the Lemon Knights in the heart of the library.
Both the BL’s child-friendly daytime sessions and the later evening event were great successes, with lots of visitors trying their hand at games old and new. Stella and her team did an incredible job playing host to a wide range of people and offering some truly bizarre activities. (Libraries are sometimes cautious about wild play, so I was delighted that Stella gave us permission for a full-on lemon battle in the shadow of the venerable stacks).
Just a quick update to tell you I’ll be speaking at two events this month.
This Sunday, 8th November, I’ll be presenting at the Thinking Through Drawing symposium in London, making 3D biographical comics with attendees in a session on “Play, Chance, and Comics”.
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 